Computer vision is a technical field in which computers process or analyze the constituent pixels of a digital image using statistical approaches, in order to produce numerical or symbolic information that reflects a visual understanding of content in the image. Examples of computer vision tasks include face detection or recognition, user interaction through gesture recognition, automatic inspection of objects, autonomous vehicle navigation, detecting events such as people counting, and organizing information such as databases of images. A computer vision processor has a computationally complex task. That task however may be made easier, by performing certain basic image conditioning operations upon the input image, in a pre-processing stage. For example, making a dark image brighter and sharper could, in some cases, enable the edges of objects therein to be detected more easily by a gesture recognition processor.